You’ve avoided hiring initially. You’ve set the bar high. You’ve decided to look for reasons to say no. You’ve established your hiring criteria. You’ve created questions based on those criteria. You’ve screened résumés, perhaps in conjunction with your HR business partner. You’ve screened candidates’ social media. You’ve conducted phone screens based on our guidance. Now it’s time to conduct a full day of onsite interviews with those candidates who remain.

When communicating with your candidate and arranging logistics, tell him exactly what the interviewing day is going to be. There is no value in surprising candidates or making them guess about what’s going to happen.

Our interviewing and hiring data show that maintaining some kind of secrecy about your process does not increase your chances of finding true positives or true negatives. It does, however, decrease your chances of offers being accepted. Candidates often tell us that a company not communicating its process is perceived to be hiding that they have no process. Further, candidates tell us that companies who tell them their process in advance and then follow that process closely are perceived to be more professional, more fair, and more likely to have determined accurately who will be a fit for them and who won’t.

Sharing your final interview process beforehand will increase the chances that you will hire whom you offer, and those whom you decline will consider your declination fair and reasonable, and be more accepting of it.

Here’s an example schedule for a final onsite interview day:

• 9:00  Hiring Manager Logistics Overview
• 9:30  Interview with Lauren Woods
• 10:45   Bathroom Break
• 10:50   Interview with Eldon Lukas
• 12:00   Interview with Wendy McGuire
• 1:00  Team Lunch, Conference Room
• 2:15   Interview with Dan Schaffer
• 3:15    Interview with Anandha Dreyer
• 4:15   Bathroom Break
• 4:20  Final Interview, Trevor West

You Start—(30) Minutes—No Interview—Brief Logistics

Before your candidate starts formally interviewing with you on the final day, take time to brief her in detail on exactly what’s going to happen. There are several reasons for this.

First, you want to give her a chance to calm down a bit. Candidates are nervous at the start of the interviewing day. Despite the way many managers talk about seeing how people perform under stress, there’s no evidence that increasing interviewing stress levels improves the likelihood of an effective hiring decision. Further, we have seen repeatedly that simple attempts to reduce interviewing stress increases the likelihood of true positives and true negatives.

The fact is, normal levels of interviewing stress are enough. In our work, we’ve seen that interviewing stress is different enough from work stress that increasing it isn’t a useful tool in making good assessments.

Second, you want to walk candidates through their interviewing day. You will have already communicated their schedule. Frequently, the schedule will have changed. This first meeting gives you the chance to give them the final version of their interview schedule.

We recommend you start with a brief welcome. Explain to the candidate that you want them to know what’s going to happen, and when. Tell them that this isn’t an interview, but what amounts to an in-briefing. [This is no reason to not be evaluating the candidate, much as you will do if they come to work for you.]

Give them the schedule, with the names of everyone they’re interviewing with on it, and the times and locations of those interviews. If you’re having them go from office to office, or cubicle to cubicle, give them a simple map to show them where everything is.

Make sure you give them your team’s phone numbers to text or call if they have a problem. You will have given everyone on your team a copy of the schedule. The best way to do this is by email. Ideally, you will have briefed your team at your most recent weekly staff meeting. Tell them all then that everyone is responsible for the candidate having a good experience. They’ll be on alert for the candidate getting lost or someone being late to an interview.

Tell the candidate, that as the schedule shows, he’ll be having a non-interview lunch with a small group. He’ll also finish the interview day with you, assuming all goes well. Finally, answer any questions he has and escort him to the first interview.

You’ll discover with this kind of full interviewing day that it’s very difficult to bring in multiple candidates on the same day. We understand the efficiency of bringing multiple candidates in on the same day; travel schedules, and unmovable meetings make scheduling days like this more difficult.

But if you bring in multiple candidates on the same day, there are two detractors to making good hiring decisions. First, logistics get much harder. A crisis or a significant change in someone’s schedule means one or both candidates will not be fully evaluated. They’ll also feel like they didn’t have the best chance to make their best impression.

Second, and more importantly, candidates who are interviewed on the same day are inevitably compared to one another. Most managers are surprised to hear this isn’t effective, but it isn’t.

Believe it or not, hiring is not about comparing candidates and picking the best one. We illustrate this at our Effective Hiring Manager Conference with a scenario.

Consider three candidates. At the end of the process, there’s a ranking in many folks’ minds: Candidate A is best, B next, and C last. The normal assumption is that candidate A is your choice.

But that’s not right. A may be the best of the three, but candidate A may still not meet your criteria for hiring. She may be best, but that only means the best of three “no’s.”

There is a greater likelihood of a “comparing candidates” mindset among your team when you bring candidates in on the same day.

The question every interviewer should be asking is “Is this candidate right for the job?” Full stop. Ranking candidates against one another is not the mindset to have. Rather, the comparison should be between each candidate and the requirements of the role.

If you’re going to consider ranking candidates, do this only with the candidates whom your process deems meet the requirements of the job. Only when more than one candidate gets unanimous approval (more on this later) in the Interview Results Capture Meeting should there be a discussion about which to hire.

What often happens with the comparative mindset is that interviewers get fixated on their “best” candidate. This is often made more difficult when different interviewers rank the candidates differently.

Further, if there are two or more candidates who meet your standards, your first choice may not accept your offer. That’s a problem we solve with the timing of offer deadlines and the communications we have with candidates once we start making offers, which we’ll discuss later.

It is easier and smarter to bring one candidate in on any day, and tell your interviewers not to compare him or her to any other candidate, but to the standard each has to meet to receive an offer. Tell them that if you’re stuck with an embarrassment of riches at the end, you’ll deal with that at that time.

(All) of Your Directs Interview

This full or nearly full day of interviews is your last chance to get as complete a sense of the candidate as you can. It makes no sense to interview someone for only one or two or even three hours if you can learn more in six or seven hours, since you might be committing to spending years with the person.

Not spending this time to make the right decision puts efficiency over effectiveness. When we hire at our firm, we sometimes conduct 20 to 30 hours of interviews, and sometimes more. This supports the principle that the only thing worse than that open position is filling it with the wrong hire.

We say “all” because it depends on the number of directs you have. Six or seven interviews is usually possible if a candidate is there for the full day, you have a group lunch, and you take 90 minutes to two hours to interview the person at the end of the day. If you have five directs, we recommend all of them interview, assuming they are ready to do so. But if you have 10 directs, not all can interview.

A member of your team who isn’t experienced in interviewing may not be ready to interview. However, to get experience, she can start by sitting in on another interview. If she does this, she should sit out of the sight of the candidate. (Behind the candidate usually works.) Have the direct conducting the interview explain that the other team member is not part of the interview. This avoids any danger—and it is a danger—of the candidate feeling that he is in a panel interview (which we’ll cover later).

Once your inexperienced team member has done that one or two times, she can be on a candidate’s schedule. You could choose to not have her input considered from her first actual interview when you ask for recommendations during the Interview Results Capture Meeting.

Don’t be too aggressive in scheduling the interview day. If the candidate has back to back to back to back interviews with no breaks, he’ll feel at a disadvantage. Your team members must know that they have to finish their interviews on time and allow time for the candidate to be on time to the next interview. Usually, you’ll want the team members to escort the candidate to the next interview when they have finished.

If you only have three directs, that leads to a shorter day. That’s fine. If you want, ask an experienced peer of yours to conduct an interview. Only do so, though, if he or she agrees to follow your guidance on the interview. You will have already told the candidate that you have a standard way of interviewing. If your peer doesn’t want to follow it, that’s his call, probably, but then don’t have him interview. We’ve seen peers do things their own way and share their disagreement with the process with the candidate. That’s not a helpful message to your potential hires.

You Interview Last for 90–120 Minutes

Your interview is last of the day, usually. You’ll want more time, because you will be taking responsibility for the candidate if he or she accepts an offer.

End with the Interview Results Capture Meeting. We’ll discuss this in Chapter 20.